Only a full investigation will determine whether Executive Branch contractors …

Presidential hopefuls Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are currently providing the country with a very public lesson in why the "privacy advocates" who oppose initiatives like Real ID and the executive branch's domestic surveillance programs should really be called "democracy advocates." In short, only a full investigation will determine whether Executive Branch contractors had political ends in mind when they inappropriately accessed the passport records of Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton on multiple occasions, but the entire incident shows exactly why citizens' privacy is critical in a country where citizens compete with one another for control of the government.

The story broke yesterday and is still developing, but so far we know that on January 9, February 21, and March 14, Obama's passport records, which are protected by the Privacy Act and are accessible only on a need-to-know basis, were accessed inappropriately by three contractors. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told the Washington Times that each access triggered the system's automated alarms, which it uses to provide an extra layer of monitoring and security for the records of high-profile individuals. After looking into the accesses, the Department determined that none of them were justified or appropriate.

McCormack informed the Times that after each the two initial breaches, the contractor responsible was fired; the investigation into the third and most recent breach is still ongoing.

Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice has apologized to Obama, and CNN reports that she has also revealed that Hillary Clinton's passport records were similarly accessed in 2007. (Not many details are available yet on this latter breach.) Both Democrats are calling for a full investigation.

Update: Reuters reports that the breach is bi-partisan; McCain was a victim, too.

Information as a political weapon

State Department officials insisted to the Times and other outlets that the contractors were motivated solely by "imprudent curiosity," and the Department and its surrogates are working to combat the notion that politics were at work in the breaches. Lawrence Eagleburger, who was George H. W. Bush's Secretary of State in 1992 when officials in his department inappropriately accessed then-candidate Bill Clinton's passport records, told MSNBC, "It's pretty clear to me that this was not done for political purposes."

Blogger Josh Marshall looked at the three dates on which the Obama breaches occurred and offered the following match-ups: "That would be the day after the New Hampshire primary, the day of the Democratic debate in Texas and the day the Wright story really hit." Of course, there have been many significant political developments since the turn of the year, so the odds of any particular group of three dates matching a major news story are quite high.

Regardless of whether the candidates' records were accessed with politics primarily in mind, the whole incident provides a vivid illustration of what's at stake in the current national debates over privacy and the limits of executive power.

Passports and national ID cards

I could spell out the political potential inherent in the executive branch's massive domestic surveillance program by drawing parallels to the government's Vietnam-era spying on anti-war protesters and civil rights leaders like MLK, but I'll leave that as an exercise to the reader. Instead, I'd rather bring the issue closer to home by talking about Real ID.

As I've reported previously, the major problem with Real ID is that local DMV and law enforcement officials will have access to an unprecedented amount of sensitive information on anyone with a Real ID—scanned copies of any documents used to establish identity, like birth certificates, bank statements, pay stubs, property tax bills, and so on, not to mention driving histories from other states. Now imagine all of that data in the hands of a crooked sheriff who's fighting off a reformist challenger in a hotly contested election. Do you really want to live in that world?

The state of California certainly doesn't, which is why it still refuses to blink in its current stand-off with the feds over the implementation of Real ID. Right now, California has bought itself some time by refusing to comply, with the state's new deadline coming up in 2010. A handful of other states are also seeking extensions.